"Walter, let's go for a walk."  - Judith Wechsler, in the arcades of Paris.

Professor Judith Wechsler is an art historian, filmmaker, writer, researcher, Francophile, and leading expert on Paul Cezanne and Honoré Daumier. She’s the daughter of a major religious philosopher. Her resume reads like a who’s who of 20th century art historians – Meyer Shapiro, Linda Nochlin, Leo Steinberg, Gershom Sholem. Her films tell the story of 20th century Europe, image by image.

She was also my grad school advisor. And she’s now a dear friend. Hers is the voice that lingers in my head, reminding me to show my work. Her background in dance and filmmaking speak to someone who, like me, sees art and art history as something that can be understood not just academically, but creatively, and interpreted creatively. You just need to make sure there’s a net below that cliff to catch you.

We all have a mentor, and Judith is mine. This conversation is deeply personal. It’s the story of a student, and her teacher, and the questions and answers that craft our journeys.

Episode webpage

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, "A Little Powder," "Basketliner"

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“It is not about fixing or mending, but about celebrating the vulnerability of the object and ultimately myself.” - Yee Sookyung

Shattered porcelain is impossible to repair. As impossible as fully, and accurately, reconstructing the past. But who needs that pressure? What if, instead of tossing those shards in the dustbin of history, we acknowledged that the thing will never be what it once was? Maybe then we appreciate the beauty, and the human resilience, of what new things it could be, in the now.

See the images.

Music used:

Billy Joel, “You May Be Right”

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Littl Jon,” “The Dustbin,” “BlueGarden,” “Nesting,” “A Rush of Clear Water,” “A Common Pause”

Leonard Cohen, “Anthem”

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"It's the close focus that draws me into a sound. And then it sort of spreads out and spreads through my body. And I let that happen, and I'm listening in a different way." - Annea Lockwood

The artist and composer Annea Lockwood is not just any musician. She is an artist of sound. She is a composer of art. Her music is performance art, and her art is always, always audio-rich and musical. She sends her microphones into the elements – fire, here, and rivers, in a recent series called Sound Maps, where she captures, among other things, the tonality of the different depths of the water. She loves chanting, tones, drones. She loves what sound does to our body, how we respond to it, how we visualize it. How sound breathes. How we breathe differently around different sounds.

And for me, as an art historian who fell in love with sound, I get it. I think I get it. And this is what today’s conversation is about. Annea joined me to talk about what it means to listen with your body, to experience the silence in all the noise, and the noise in the silence. We talk about the value of musical training versus musical instinct. We talk about how rivers sound different from one another (they really do!). And we explore what an artist from New Zealand who gained prominence in the 1960s burning pianos can teach us about the art of sound, and what she can learn from her 85-year-old self, today.

Episode webpage

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, "Brer Rhetta," “A Common Pause,” "Tanguedo"

Episode sponsors:

Art of Crime

The Seattle Prize

Visual Arts Passage

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"The only thing permanent is change." - Felix Gonzalez-Torres

There is no way around it. The work of Felix Gonzalez-Torres, a gay, Cuban-American artist who responded to - and died during - the AIDS crisis of the 1980s and 90s, is sad. His work is a memorial, both to a lost generation and to his own partner, Ross. Yet it is through these seemingly banal, industrial, or every day materials, and the powerful metaphor that they represent, that we can best get to the root of what loss can mean. And, maybe, healing as well.

See the images.

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, “A Little Powder,” “Lerennis,” “Taoudella,” “The Melt,” “Rafter”

Open Book, “Second Chance”

Episode sponsors:

Art of Crime

The Seattle Prize

Visual Arts Passage

Smartist App

With extra special thanks to Martin Young.

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“In the end, what interests me is the way art connects with life. Because otherwise, I don’t quite understand what it’s for.” - Sebastian Smee

Sebastian Smee has been the art critic for the Washington Post since 2018, but has written extensively about art for every publication you can think of, from here to his native Australia, and winning a Pulitzer prize for criticism along the way. Both his prose and his love of the work leaps off the page and into your lap, offering a guiding hand past the velvet rope, not just for his readers, but for himself: he’s a critic who is constantly looking inward, curious about his own responses to artworks, and what it can teach him about teaching us.

Sebastian joined me to discuss his latest book, “Paris in Ruins: Love, War, and the Birth of Impressionism,” as well as writers on writing, becoming an expert about a movement on deadline, how looking back at the muddiness of a historical moment can help us understand the muddiness of ours, and what happens when art critics are themselves at a loss for the words to express why they just love this or that painting so darn much.

See the images.

Music used:

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Town Market,” “Night Light,” “Brass Buttons”

Episode sponsor:

The Art of Crime Podcast

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"My line does not illustrate. It is the sensation of its own realization." - Cy Twombly

Critics have described the work of consummate scribbler Cy Twombly as at once "barely there" and overly academic, but what about us art civilians? What is it about these half-baked scraps, scratch, and scrawl that speaks to our own creative impulses, our own inner children dying to grab the crayon and crush the tip in an ecstatic series of fat, juicy loopdeloops?

See the images.

Music used:

The Andrews Sisters, "Bei Mir Bist Du Schoen"

The Blue Dot Sessions, “Inessential,” “Tiny Putty,” “A Burst of Light,” Palms Down,” “Parade Shoes,” “City Limits”

Episode sponsor:

The Art of Crime Podcast

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This season, we've got a stellar line-up: Cy Twombly, Lawren Harris, Käthe Kollwitz, and Felix Gonzalez-Torres, to name just a few. We've got interviews with the Washington Post's Sebastian Smee, the artist and composer Annea Lockwood, and more. We've got a whole National Gallery residency! So listen and subscribe, rate and review, and fire up your earbuds for another season of looking with your ears.

If you support the work we do, consider becoming a patron, or simply leaving us a tip.

Tamar is alive! The Lonely Palette is alive! But in the year since we last spoke, she's been elbow-deep in audio projects galore - good for the pocketbook, but bad for independent art history podcast productivity. But your patience will be rewarded! And in the meantime, a few announcements:

- Join me and my fellow H&S colleagues at the PRX Podcast Garage in Allson, MA on Wednesday, November 6 for an evening of audio camaraderie. Register here.
- Explore our Hub & Spoke Expo showcase, starting with the first episode of our very first exclusive Expo series, "The Rabbis Go South." (All episodes now available!)

Imagine 16 American rabbis jailed for acting on their beliefs. The Rabbis Go South is a thrilling seven-part narrative podcast that uncovers a true story of Jewish-Black solidarity in St. Augustine, Florida during the Civil Rights Movement. An inspiring tale of hope for a divided world.

The Rabbis Go South was created by documentary filmmakers Amy Geller and Gerald Peary. It’s a presentation of the Hub & Spoke Expo.

In this special episode of The Lonely Palette, I’m sharing the episode I made for the PRX limited-run podcast series "Monumental," which interrogates the state of monuments across the greater U.S. and what their future says about where we are now and where we’re going.

This was the concluding episode, exploring how some monuments are larger than life, dwarfing us, making us feel small relative to the grandness of history. But what if a monument was human-scaled? What if it made us aware of our bodies in space? We don’t often think about the design choices that go into making a monument, but more and more, a new generation of artists and designers are reimagining what a monument can look and feel like, and the kinds of stories they can hold.

This episode takes us to Montgomery, Alabama to the National Memorial for Peace and Justice, to Shreveport, Louisiana, to the South Side of Chicago, to Navajo Nation in Arizona. It explores how many American monuments to slavery took inspiration from Holocaust memorials in Germany. And it looks at decentralized memorials that are using technology to help bring monuments to the past into the future.

Listen to the Monumental podcast series.

See the images.

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The Lonely Palette, as you've heard so often, is an enormously proud founding member of the Hub & Spoke Audio Collective, a group of fiercely independent, story-driven, mind-expanding podcasts. Since 2017, we've supported each other while forging our own paths, prioritizing craft and humane storytelling above all else.

Now, if you haven't noticed, media in general, and podcasting in particular, is in a space some may generously call post-apocalyptic. But an incredible silver lining is that the industry is now recognizing how important independence is. We've been here all along, and with your support, we're not going anywhere.

Please enjoy a bonus episode of the Hub & Spoke Radio Hour, a tasty sampler of a few of our shows in a dapper audio package. Today's theme is love. As the philosopher Haddaway once asked, what is love? It turns out, love can be anything that stirs the heart: passion, grief, affection, kin. The desire to consume; the poignancy of memory. Here at Hub & Spoke, we want to stretch our arms, and ears, around it all.

This episode is hosted by Lori Mortimer and edited by Tamar Avishai. Production assistance from Nick Andersen. Music by Evalyn Parry, The Blue Dot Sessions, and a kiss of Dionne Warwick.

Listen to the full episodes:
- Rumble Strip, “Forrest Foster Lays Karen to Rest”
- Mementos “Cherie’s Letters”
- Ministry of Ideas, “Consumed”
- The Lonely Palette, “Jean-Honoré Fragonard's The Desired Moment (c. 1770)”

You can also share the love by supporting our Valentine’s Day fundraiser: www.hubspokeaudio.org/love